Sorry to take so long to respond...
... but I wanted to give PC-BSD (another) fair evaluation.
I tried it a few years ago. Buggy, but I blamed a lot of it on Microsoft Virtual PC (it was right around the time when MS VPC was the only OK, free VM system for Windows). Tried it for a few days in Virtual Box... it's still buggy. It's not all PC-BSD's fault, of course. But after even a light amount of usage it was clear that I would be wanting to poke my eyeballs out after a week of constant usage.
For example, I was trying the "Amorak" application for media playing. Never mind the obtuse UI, I got it to add things from Last.FM... but they never actually played. So I tried opening last.fm in Chromium, and there was something wrong with how the system worked because it sounded like Alvin & the Chipmunks. Tried various songs, all the same result. Tried playing songs in other players, worked fine, so I knew it wasn't the sound system goofing. I then tried it in Konqueror, and it wouldn't work at all.
Chromium itself displayed bugs that I've never seen in Chrome for Windows. I couldn't set it as the default browser, I kept clicking the button over and over again, it still wasn't the default. Rebooted, same thing.
If I can't even set my default browser to be what I want it to be without ripping apart some configuration file, I don't think I am going to live terribly happily with a system. Again, I doubt this is PC-BSD's fault, it feels like the applications for it just stink. I'm sure the issue with Last.FM was something like a bad Flash implementation or codec or something. Honestly, though, I don't care. This is the kind of thing that should, and needs to "just work" for a system and I to get along.
The first time I tried to use Control Panel and the System Manager, it locked Control Panel so badly that only a reboot could kill the task! I'm guessing that a kill -9 would have taken it down too... but seriously, when using a desktop manager, having to kill tasks via command line is just... 1995.
It's a shame, because the overall progress compared to my last run with PC-BSD is good. The system is slick and quite usable. It was different from Windows (and could have been a LOT more different from Windows and I would have been fine), but it was sensible and easy to get acclimated. The application choices were decent.
I will take a look at Catalyst at some point, and GhostBSD as well. I fear that my experience with GhostBSD will not be much different from PC-BSD, due to the issues seeming to reside at the application level.
J.Ja
Contributr 
